Plenty strikers - just one goal (Well … 0 GERS … 1)

Peter Lovenkrands: Some pundits like to focus only on his SPL stats - so that’s nine in his his last six games. This punter likes to focus on the entire duration of his richest ever scoring vein; So - Champions Lague, Scottish Cup and SPL - that, today, was Peter’s tenth goal in his last nine outings.

Shortly after his lavish lashing of the ball into the net, with too much of the second half still to play, our Princely young Dane headed a bit more towards the Hamlet by going down the tunnel on a stretcher. Immediate reports say he’ll be fine - just a knock to a muscle. Just as well. Be it through injury or the January transfer window, if we lost him at the moment it’d be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Literature-ly: The trauma of ten games without a win, followed by the eternal hope of ten goals in nine games, followed hard upon by the loss of our only guaranteed goal-getter. Yup - ye need to have a taste of real hope, an inkling that your bad days will be overcome by a glorious realisation of ambition, before a loss can be truly tragic.

Over the last month we’ve all been debating the reason for Peter’s run of form: Is it due to McLeish playing him through the middle instead of out on the wing or is it because the guy is simply looking for more money, be that from Rangers or whichever Premiership club his agent prefers? The cynicism is not unfair - in his five and a half years at the club, despite plenty of singulalry memorable and important goals, Lovenkrands has never performed as consistently well as he has since December began … since it was “one month til transfer time!”. However, his all-round effort this season, from day one, has been almost uniformly improved. His appetite has been ostensibly keener since McLeish first made noises about letting him go: That’s not mercenary - that’s just growing up. He played plenty game before December where he wasn’t getting the goals or the touches but he was very clearly running himself into the ground - there’s every reason to belive that a switch of position and a reaping of the physical investment he made in those autumn games could combine to make his present barrage more natural than sinister.

In the context of what we saw today, if he leaves Ibrox, or if he becomes injured, or if he simply stops trying once we offer him new terms, it wil be an unmitigated tragedy for our season. Who thought we’d ever be saying this! This is something of a revelation for most of us but Peter Lovenkrands has become the spine of consistency on which our hopes rest for 2005/2006. Little wonder he went down at Fir Park clutching the small of his back.

Today we actually saw every one of our main striking options turn out in Lanarkshire. It wasn’t encouraging. Lack of match-fitness, tactical tinkering, lack of orientation - for one reason or another, all of these strikers were prevented from showing us enough to impress: All except the one who seems most likely to leave before February.

Yes, Prso and Novo will improve as they get more games but we don’t have too many more games left. When we next meet Motherwell, it’ll be the final game before the SPL split. There’s sixteen League games remnant on the fixture list. We need Celtic to drop an average of one point per game and then one more, if we are to retain the SPL crown. And this dream becomes more fanciful when you consider what must also occur in Scotland’s capital to enable its realisation: Hibs are now just a point in front of us and must be overhauled in the cup too but the real face-saver has to be Hearts - 10 points ahead and, ominously, like us, beginning to improve their dismal away form. We need a total collapse from two clubs to win the league and a total collapse from one just to make the Champions League qualifying spot.

And, along with all this, we need Rangers to keep winning.

Today we did that. We won our second straight SPL match. We won our third game on the bounce. We extended our unbeaten run to 8 and, with Livingston at home and Inverness away our next two fixtures, we should look to answer our 10-game unwinning streak with a 10-game unlosing streak. Hey - we haven’t conceded a goal in our last three matches! However, as exemplified by the draw at East End Park on Boxing Day, simply not losing is not enough for Rangers. Furthermore, with so much ground to gain and so much pride to restore in domestic matters, simply winning is no longer enough:

Boring, tight, ropey victories are fine - I have nothing against them - but they’re only any good to us as top-ups to a season of consistent success. Consistency was the true beauty in the work of Nick Faldo, Steve Davis and Bjorn Borg in their prime. Slim victories and unspectacular performances were augmented by the staggering number of other victories by which they were parenthesised. But when we’ve plummed the depths as we have in 2005/2006, we need to see signs of outright brilliance. The performances need to give us the confidence which the season-long stats just don’t provide. When our manager has been allowed to remain at the club after so many doubts were expressed over his reign, that move has to be justified with at least one or two displays which Seve Ballesteros, Jimmy White or John McEnroe would be proud of.

We need something to warm the cockles of our hearts. A long run of failure may explain the tentative nature of our return to winning ways but that return needs some solidifying. There must be a display of such conviction and class that everyone in the stands and on the pitch is reminded and reassured of our abilities. We need something to help breed inate confidence. There should be one or two winning games in which we are not either bored (3-0 v Dundee United) or worried (3-0 v Dundee United AND today). There just hasn’t been an SPL game this season in which we’ve SMASHED all the doubts, EXPLODED back into life or BLOWN AWAY a worthy opponent.

Motherwell hit the bar today, had one shot cleared off the line by Soti and another brilliantly saved at point-blank range by Ronnie Waterreus. For almost the entire first half they controlled proceedings. Okay, Motherwell are always up for it at Fir Park - this is, of course, where the SPL title was lost last season - and Scott McDonald seems to be Dougie Arnott reincarnated, but they are also the team which lost 3-0 to a First Division side in last week’s Scottish Cup Third Round. Rangers won this game on the strangth of some brave but clumsy defending and one twenty-minute period of sustained pressure worthy of our name. As I say, it’s okay to operate under such slender margins if you’re top of the table and have been there for months on end - it’s okay to be so economical if it’s deliberate. But we just look poor - as if we’re getting through such games by sheer dint of being Rangers, by an ancestral pull towards victory rather than simply being the better team on the day.

Soti and Marvin, sometimes Marvin and Bob, seemed to be jumping all over each other every time a high ball came into our box. The midfield was thin and chasing shadows for long periods. Credit is due for doing enough but, the game itself was so dull and boring - not even the tetchiness so prevalent when we go to Fir Park these days spilled over into any real rammies - that you want to look at the signs it gave us for the long term: We need J-Rod back and we need two new centre-halves and a left-sided midfielder … and probably a right-back to let Ian Murray become our left-back OR our left-sided midfielder! - but the presence of so many proven strikers today maeans that the immediate debate is all about how to deploy them.

As we said in Thursday’s pre-match rant, there could be no justification for not playing Kris Boyd, when he is both Scotland’s top scorer and has immediately settled into the club with a hat-trick in the Scottish Cup. But there could also be no justification for altering an attacking formation - Buffel off Lovenkrands through the middle - which has reaped such rewards for us over the last few weeks. As feared, Tommy was pushed into a midfield berth again - he just can’t do it starting from out wide - and Kris played up front with Lovenpants. Boyd looks a hell-of a-lot like Chris Sutton in his style of game (that is actually a compliment) but today he looked more like a guy settling in than he did last week.

Infuriatingly, Buffel was subbed just when his second-half step into the middle of the pitch was reaping rewards - why does McLeish ALWAYS sub our attacking players when we have a slender lead AND the player going off is the guy who has powered us into that lead??!! Barry lost his Thierry Henry-Gavin Henson-That Tenis Player, gaybo vest at the interval, along with his inhibitions. He handled the ball in the Motherwell box right at the start of the game and we were lucky to get way with conceding a penalty - but he did enough probing in the second period to give us that 20-minute spell of pressure which won the game.

Big Bob’s delivery had been great all day and his free kick into the box found Lovenkrands perfectly. Pete nodded toward the back post.; Marv Took the sting out the ball with his first header and held a Motherwell player off as if restraining a troublesome toddler, as the ball fell down onto his head again: The colossus nodded it down onto plate for Peter who volleyed home so easily and in so much space that I waited for an offside flag, despite the obvious presence of so many Well defenders between him and the goal-line.

Prso and Novo came on and both need more games - more worrying a statement for Novo who has had quite a few now. Buffel and Lovenkrands went off. Surely Tommy wasn’t withdrawn simply because he raged at the ref for his hand-ball booking??!! Because, ye see, when these guys left the pitch, so did Rangers’ control of the game. A control which was enjoyed all too briefly.

Apart from our failure to make the best of our manifold atacking options - in truth I think this is mainly down to a one-man midfield being unable to keep the supply lines open for sufficient periods of time - there were two other depressing aspects today: Our failure to properly return the ball to Motherwell when they knocked it out to allow treatment for Lovenkrands (we pinned them in their own corner rather than giving it back to them square) and, once again, WHERE ARE THE RED AND BLACK SOCKS???!!! I’ve nothing against Everton or Chelsea but, I just want us to look like Rangers - in terms of behaviour, attire AND conviction of performance.